Astrid Kajsa Nylander b. 1989

Overview

Astrid Kajsa Nylander was born in Gothenburg, Sweden.

Lives and works in Stockholm, Sweden.

Nylander studied at Hochschule für Bildende Künste Hamburg and graduated with an MFA in 2018. Nylander creates colorful and playful paintings, often in shaped canvases and neon colors. Her ongoing series ”minijobs” are small paintings in geometric or floral shapes, depicting a memory of buttons. The series function as fierce bursts of ideas, adding to a bigger body of work altogether where nostalgia, dark humor and vibrant pops of color meet. Nylander’s ”minijobs” works are represented in the collection of Moderna Museet in Stockholm.

Previous solo exhibitions include Belenius in 2022, Page, NYC in 2020 and Kunstverein Siegen in 2019. In 2019 Nylander was awarded the Stiftung Sparkasse Siegen prize for ”Junge Kunst” followed by a solo presentation in Siegen Kunstverein (DE). Nylander had both curated and exhibited her works at a group exhibition draw a door in the wall and slip through it at Belenius in 2023 with her friends and previous classmates, artists Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, Beatrice Marchi and Tanja Nis-Hansen from Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg.

Button by button by button, role playing. A childhood memory of grandmother’s colour-sorted button collection. Thread in, thread out, thread through and tie a knot on the thread. Astrid Kajsa Nylander indulge in the joy of colour and experiments with reality. Her minijobs are hyper-realistic, decorative and colourful, but have an underlying daunting tone. They form intricate patterns where they are fixed on the wall, and the threads over the surface of the paintings are braided together like something akin to runic writing. She lays them out in irregular patterns composing new formations. They bounce off their wall-hung seats and look for each other. They are fascinating geometric figures reminiscent of pop art, and yet something completely different. They are of a world of their own.

– Lena Holger

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Installation shots